Taking Future-Oriented Sensemaking Online: An Infrastructural Perspective

As organizations increasingly turn to online settings for strategic
planning and foresight endeavors, fundamental questions arise of how this
affects sensemaking activities: traditional sensemaking perspectives implicitly
assume the availability of physical co-presence and its associated affordances.
However, when sensemaking ‘moves online’ these taken-for-granted
foundations are diminished. Drawing on data from a series of inter-
organizational foresight workshops that were held both online and offline, we
identify an underlying ‘sensemaking infrastructure’ consisting of three pillars
that appear to be fundamental for sensemaking to take place in digital arenas:
cognitive involvement, social engagement and prospective entanglement. Our
study contributes to the literature by extending the sensemaking perspective with
an infrastructural lens, shifting the analytical focus from sensemaking processes
to the resources and prerequisites necessary for sensemaking to effectively take
place in the digital realm. Concurrently, we provide actionable insights and
facilitation approaches for building online settings that are conducive to making
sense of the future.